Biggest Shakespeare festival ever will straddle the London Olympics

Companies from all over the world are coming to England in 2012 to join an extravaganza of Shakespeare productions

The Globe theatre in London will stage all 37 of Shakespeare's during the 2012 festival, presented by guest companies from around the world. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian Linda Nylind/Guardian

More than a million tickets go on sale next month for an explosion of Shakespeare productions that will coincide with the London Olympics. They will involve thousands of actors, hundreds of professional and amateur theatre companies, and scores of languages, all part of the biggest Shakespeare festival ever organised.

Details were announced as new research commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the British Council revealed that the bard is the world's most studied author, pored over by half the world's schoolchildren, at least 64 million each year. His work is a compulsory secondary school subject in countries including Azerbaijan, China, Oman, the Philippines and Vietnam.

The Globe, the recreation on Bankside in London of Shakespeare's own theatre, is mounting all 37 of his plays, presented by guest companies in 37 languages, including Arabic, Yoruba and Armenian. Globe artistic director Dominic Dromgoole is particularly proud of including a company from "the newest country in the world, South Sudan, which has yet to celebrate its first birthday". It will perform in Juba Arabic. An Iraqi company is bringing a Romeo and Juliet, where the warring families are Sunni and Shia, and a company from Tunisia is staging a version of Macbeth looking at power and repression among Arab leaders.

The Barbican is hosting Yukio Ninagawa's production of Cymbeline in Japanese. Michael Boyd, artistic director of the RSC, said promised they will be "outrageously collaborative".

At Stratford-upon-Avon, Russian director Dmitry Krymov will present the world premiere of his version of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Russian, a Brazilian company using circus skills is tackling Richard II and the National Theatre of Mexico is creating a political thriller about the Aztecs, based on Shakespeare's history plays.

The RSC itself is creating an Asian production of Much Ado About Nothing, starring Meera Syal, and a black African Julius Caesar directed by Greg Doran, as well as a quartet of the shipwreck plays under the haunting title, taken from a line in Twelfth Night, What Country, Friends, Is This?

The National Theatre's offerings will include Simon Russell Beale, one of the most acclaimed Shakespearean actors of his generation, as Timon of Athens, directed by Nicholas Hytner, while Jonathan Pryce tackles King Lear, directed by Michael Attenborough, at the Almeida.

The British Museum is creating a major exhibition, Staging the World, looking at the rest of the world as Shakespeare's audiences understood it. The displays will include a watercolour of one of the Inuit people brought back by the explorer Martin Frobisher, referred to in Shakespeare's Tempest.

Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, said Shakespeare "is now part of the patrimony of the whole world". The programming for the festival reflects Shakespeare's global reach.

Ruth Mackenzie, director of the Cultural Olympiad, said putting Shakespeare at the heart of the cultural festival was "one of the trump cards" in winning the games for London. "Shakespeare belongs to everyone in the world, their own playwright talking to them about their own concerns."

As well as the professionals, hundreds of amateur companies will mount productions all over Britain, including a naval version of Much Ado About Nothing in the Portsmouth historic dockyard with Nelson's flagship HMS Victory as a backdrop.